Bush Era Lies Will Linger for a Long Time

Bush Era Lies Will Linger for a Long Time

by

Rosa Brooks

How did they ever get away with it?

Last week, the Justice Department released a batch of memos drafted
in 2001 and 2002 by lawyers in the Bush administration's Office of
Legal Counsel. Written mainly by John Yoo, then a deputy director
in the office, they laid out the purported legal justifications for
a theory of presidential power amounting to virtual
dictatorship.

Collectively, they declare that if the U.S. military were deployed
against suspected terrorists inside the United States, even U.S.
citizens wouldn't be protected by the Fourth Amendment's
prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. They also
conclude that citizens and noncitizens could be designated
"unlawful enemy combatants" by the president on the basis of secret
evidence. And once that happens, they could be locked up
indefinitely and tortured, without charge, access to counsel or any
procedure through which to challenge the detention or
treatment.

I know: All this is old hat. With so many leaks over the years, who
doesn't know by now that the Bush administration sought virtually
unlimited executive power to monitor, detain and use force against
individuals anywhere around the globe in the name of the "war on
terror"?

But even today, it's still shocking to see it laid out in black and
white.

In a way, what's most shocking is just how outrageously bad the
office's legal arguments were. The 2001-2002 memos mischaracterize
previous Supreme Court decisions, ignore crucial legal precedents
and contain gaping holes in logic. To accept the theories the
Office of Legal Counsel came up with, you need to assume that
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had it all wrong when they
rebelled against Britain's King George III in 1776. You need to
believe, more or less, that the 225 years of American jurisprudence
between 1776 and 2001 amounted to one giant mistake.

The memos are so embarrassingly foolish that the Office of Legal
Counsel itself was ultimately forced to repudiate them. In October
2008, the office advised that "caution should be exercised before
relying in any respect" on its own previous advice about domestic
surveillance or the domestic use of the military. A week before
President Barack Obama's inauguration, the office issued another
"never mind" memo, stating that "certain propositions stated in
several memos respecting ... matters of war and national security
do not reflect the current views of this office."

Better late than never, I guess.

But all this raises the question: How did such dangerously bad
legal memos ever get taken seriously in the first place?

One answer is suggested by the so-called Big Lie theory of
political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler.
Ordinary people "more readily fall victim to the big lie than the
small lie," wrote Hitler, "since they themselves often tell small
lies ... but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal
untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the
impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

In other words: Paradoxically, the more outrageous the claim, the
more apt we are to assume there must be some truth to it. Just as
some banks and insurance companies are apparently "too big to
fail," some claims from those with political power seem to strike
us as "too big to disbelieve." "That seems so outrageous it must be
right," we tell ourselves. "The important people keep saying it --
they must know something I don't know."

That's the only explanation I can come up with for why the
2001-2002 memos stood as Bush administration doctrine for as long
as they did. (The Big Lie theory also helps explain why other
manifestly false Bush administration claims prevailed in the face
of the evidence: Recall, for instance, how we were assured that
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the war would be a
cakewalk?)

Big lies prevail because we can't bring ourselves to believe that
our leaders could be so dishonest or deluded. And big lies can do
terrible damage, of course. The Bush administration's big legal
lies paved the way for some of the most shameful episodes in our
history, including the official authorization of torture.

In the end, thankfully, all big lies collapse under their own
weight. We're in a new era: The early memos produced by the office
have been repudiated, and the Bush administration was sent packing
with rock-bottom public approval ratings.

But don't think we're out of the woods. As Hitler demonstrated,
some small part of the most "impudent lies" will always remain and
stick. Big lies leave little lies in their wake, changing the
political discourse in enduring, difficult-to-detect ways.

And that's the challenge we now face: tracing the barely visible
effects of the Bush administration's now-repudiated big lies --
through our legal system, our constitutional system, our foreign
policy -- and undoing all the damage.

Further

With the toxic Bibi circus in town - cue talk of "tentacles of terror" - find hope in the extraordinary Combatants For Peace, a joint effort by weary Israeli and Palestinian veterans of violence who've laid down their guns to fight for peace. Led by a former IDF soldier and Fatah militant who both lost daughters to the conflict's "unrightable wrongs," they insist on the need to "hear what is painful" and talk to your 'enemies': "Partners for peace always exist. You only have to look for them."